Category: Self Actualization

As the year comes to a close I pause to reflect on what I love. I love this river. She is a pristine sanctuary that delights me with her enchanted emerald green pools.

I love dance. I love dancing in costumes. I love dancing in comfy clothes. I love dancing naked. I love dancing in community. I love dancing in my back yard. I love dancing with kids! I love wild anything goes dancing. I love dancing in gold threads.

I love Nature. I love soft grass. I love my rose tree. I love swimming in the sea. I love swimming in rivers. I love the change of seasons. I love flowers. I love bumble bees. I love sunsets. I love snow on the mountains. I love the sunsets near my home.

I love my daughter. The child who came through me, who is of me but does not belong to me. I honour the journey we’ve shared so far. Thank you for being my greatest teacher. It really has not been easy, yet I am in awe of you, how you change and grow. I miss you near. I hold you dear.

I love cooking. I love cooking curry and bliss balls and cake and apple pie.

I love celebration. I love parties and countdowns and fireworks and concerts.

I love travel. I’ve been to India several times, West Coast of USA, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Canada and New Zealand… and I’m only just warming up. I love the new smells and foods and sounds and faces. I love the different things to wear and see.

I love berries. Strawberries, cherries and raspberries. I love squishing the berries and seeing the colours all mix over my hand. Perfect water colours. Perfect ye olde lipsticks me thinks.

I love water colours. I love how it flows and it cannot be controlled.

I love conversation. I love a good ole cup of tea and a chat with young and old. The lady at the end of my street. Hester’s Mum. The seventy year old woman I met on the dance floor on Sunday, an earth Goddess!

I love singing. Mantras and eighties songs, the themes of my youth. Your true colours are beautiful and ‘Wake me up before you go go’! are etched in my bark.

I love the experience of being alive. Each day a new creation. Each day a new expression of self flowing through this soft body.

One of the themes I grew up with growing up catholic and going to an all girls private school was that girls should be ‘nice’, ‘good’ and ‘clean’! Ha! I was a nature loving ‘tom boy.’

I was supposed to be ‘clean and good’ but in truth I was ‘wild and dirty’ from playing in the creeks and the wet mud after the rain.

I was awake early and off like a thunderbolt on my bike around the countryside on the weekends before Mum and Dad got up.

As a young girl I was curious, adventurous and very physical. I was an outside girl. I rolled down hills and swam with tadpoles. I learned when it was safe to be wild and when it was not. I learned when to smile sweetly and when to show my teeth.

I played in trees and travelled huge distances in my local terrain on foot and later on my red bicycle with my dingo cross kelpie dog Georgie Girl.

Consequently when it came to birth I was not compliant and I had a voice. I even said to my midwife as my daughter was coming out, “Don’t you pull my baby out of me!” She didn’t.

I was one of the lucky ones.

Too many women are still playing nice, good girl roles. We are too bloody compliant.

We apologize for everything, we mute our true voice and we are concerned about looking good.

We do what we are told and cannot ask for what we want and need.

I sometimes fall into this trap too, I have to admit.

What ideas about being a girl did you absorb growing up? Can you ask for support? Can you say NO? Can you tell someone to go away? Ask someone to leave the room?

The early patterns from childhood play out big time in our lives as women giving birth.

Early ideas from parents, TV and teachers may have submerged deep into us, and we have forgotten about them.

These old ideas can be controlling us without our awareness.

We have to stalk these predators. We must eliminate anything that no longer serves us today. It’s okay now to finally show our true colours, our grass stains and our deeper voice.

It’s a journey and I still sometimes struggle to say NO. I’m not perfect. I’m still learning.

As we mature we have the task of sorting the gold from the dirt.

We have to determine what we truly value.

We have to determine what we think and feel.

We have to determine what we want to protect and what we do not mind losing or giving up.

One thing for sure, as women, as mothers, we have to protect what we love.

Allowing ourselves to carve out our own ideas and values is an important part of becoming ourselves. Allowing everyone else to have their views is important too.

We are our own person and we can live, birth and parent the way we choose. In fact it is essential we do.